The Social Costs of Gun Ownership

Phillip J. Cook, Jens Ludwig

NBER Working Paper No. 10736
Issued in September 2004
NBER Program(s):Health Economics Program

This paper provides new estimates of the effect of household gun prevalence on homicide rates, and infers the marginal external cost of handgun ownership. The estimates utilize a superior proxy for gun prevalence, the percentage of suicides committed with a gun, which we validate. Using county- and state-level panels for 20 years, we estimate the elasticity of homicide with respect to gun prevalence as between +.1 and +.3. All of the effect of gun prevalence is on gun homicide rates. Under certain reasonable assumptions, the average annual marginal social cost of household gun ownership is in the range $100 to $600.

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Document Object Identifier (DOI): 10.3386/w10736

Published: Cook, Philip J. and Jens Ludwig. "The Social Costs Of Gun Ownership," Journal of Public Economics, 2006, v90(1-2,Jan), 379-391.

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